Tag Archives: love

118. Long Hair

When I took 

what came to me 

I took 

Idaho pool halls with 

old men coughing phlegm 

and young men staring bullets

at serapes, bare feet,

at bracelets,

at our beer crossing the wood bar.

Neon flashed our long hair

into snakes of flying highways.

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took Quebec-quoi love songs in RV’s 

rocking under original tunes

 and the brown eyed boy 

thinking out loud in accented English

into my long hair,

limp from acrobatic highways.

 

When I took what came to me

I took 

bottle flies crawling corners

of bloodshot eyes beside ditches.

I took

thick fog holding my arms in gloom

under sequoia canopies.

I took fish

offered from withered hands 

under California cardboard. 

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took 

crowds behind glass under stars,

sweet smoke long in my lungs

 and a pull off Glen Fiddich,

overlooking unpaved highways

scratching and scraping their way.

I took 

red earth against my damp cheek

smelling of safety when I woke at dawn

beside graveyards prickling

the air with white stones. 

 

When I took what came to me, I took

what came, 

satiated by novas of my own 

flirtation, inhaling with abandon 

the exhaust 

of winding highways, 

clouds in my 

long hair.

109. Fieldwork

 

Walking across Wyoming

I fell for you, your curls

sweat plastered, your eyes

changing blue to green, your

flirting with waitresses while

I watched laughing for your shy

young hands hiding. I fell

longing for the touch 

of your brown hand brushing

my brown hand, my bleached

hair tangled in your mistaken 

fingers, exchanging Farka Toure

for Fugazi, breaking

my eardrums, my patience,

my grown wild heart.

 

Days are shrinking now, hit hard

by winds that parch, skinning

sun raw by desert sand

carried. At night I hear radio 

voices clattering between our tents,

restless and urgent. Walking, I see 

fire-cracked rock buried 

beneath sand, the way

our eyes plant explosives through

the unnamed senses. At night

you visit philosophy, torturing

breakfast and still …

 

Spain is one half-assed plan 

to work through winter, one

idea cooked up on a stormy day

of crackling lightning and a missed

tornado. Next, Cuba, but no one liked 

that, not even you knowing

about the whores and cuba libres

and hot sun, hot salt on skin.

Or Argentina has friends waiting,

long digs and pampas like home,

all in Spanish. If we both

rode an airplane to Patagonia

would you even hold my hand

shoo the Latinos from their lust?

Or would you indulge your own for me,

turned south and wild with hunger?

I fell for you like that hail

fell hard to earth last week.

Hug me, miss me.

107. my aunts

.

my aunts look like my

mother as they age, lovely

eyes and smiles that blow

all the fuses. their blood

pulses ancestral coal and tin, skin

slick with a ranch’s fresh

stench of branding: in this case

.

colts and

madness and

– oddly –

social justice a rich seam, shot through

the bedrock of calving and misogyny.

.

rage and shame, too, evenly laid,

thin but

persistent lodes snaking

through each sister.

.

how alive two are yet, how 

men stunted them all,

the girls. 

now they fade.

they stare out across dry lawns,

all the colts broken

.

and we cousins sigh,

softly and half lost like the ranch

left fallow for our

winter.

77. Wide Clean Valleys

Jacked up on old fantasies 

of fierce men with guns

and fists tough enough to take out

Spaniards hissing at my long hair

and Mexicans, Italians touching

my breasts on streetcars

I’ve got this cowboy 

combing my hair.

For now all the borders are safe,

home on the range.

.

Back in the north in the winds

in the late spring blizzards freezing calves

still slick with the snot of birth

I may sculpt dreams differently.

His moustache might tickle,

or crystals in the mountain

could direct spirits to spin

tighter casings around my heart,

kicking the handyman loose.

.

In preparation I savor moments

like single pomegranate seeds

bursting sweet across my tongue.

I gather him to me and feed us both

on tender moves, animal lust, 

creosote blossoms and 

wide, 

wide

clean valleys.

.

73. Tiptoe

Watching him while

he sleeps I

steep myself in the 

tea color of his

skin

vanish in fragile

lashes

hopeless against his

cheek, reappear

stroking long hair off 

a temple

with one of my small fingers.

I memorize the

unusual curve of 

a hip

heft of his dark

testicles

resting promise of

his quiescent 

cock curled

softly.

His sturdy shoulder his

brawny arm draped warm over

me sheltering my 

delicate ribs.

With my weightless

vision I cherish my

lover

astonished,

reverent within all of 

our variances.

69. Stars

Stars skip out over the black branches

of screwbean mesquite, catalyzing

coyotes hungry for a breeze,

a rabbit, each other.

.

I would guide your hand across my body

star to star and between each

we would be one in one space.

If you were here I would,

to hear your breath catch

to taste the desert dust

crushed creosote and wolfberries

and the sweat-salt of hunger

hot on our cracked lips.

I would tenderly swing my body

in an arc as wide as Sonoran horizons

to include all of you in my passion,

quiet as midday, bold as midnight

and strong as both

in joined silence.

.

Creosote blooms leak notes the desert air

hangs all the other notes from 

to weld a symphony.

.

60. 1989 (for F)

In this photograph grass is dirty

blond pelt of earth blown to 

bend inland, blown to 

bend touch your 

flanks the way my hair leaned 

in candlelight toward you, your 

tender palms currying 

my own flanks.

.

In the photograph your black eyes

lock to the lens, keeping you.

.

In this photograph of your lithe 

body young by the sea, casual

in its place against earth, intense 

in its focus on my hand cradling 

a cold camera, every slow 

night gone leans inland, arrives

on a new wind

to wake me from age.

56. nomad

because one candle burned down last night

gutting itself on its own light

while the other casts one more day loose 

i suspect the timing of all pairs is off by a breath

a footstep 

one caress.

still, the still night’s beauty

burns a million holes in the black sky,

all lucid affirmation and complicated constellations 

dreamed every century by nomads 

who find each other.  

it is true that my faith in stars 

and the symmetry of two 

matches closely enough 

a moment 

the cast of an eye

and that candles are for settlers

whom I never really understood.